Older Versions of Pages Used to Find and Replace Formatting and Styles

You could find and replace words formatted in bold, italic and so on, plus words formatted with styles. This was years back before Apple worked to make all of its apps on Mac, iPad, iCloud, iPhone identical in function. Formatting and style find and replace worked well for Apple. But that is now gone. Users of MS Word sometimes call this function "robust" but it really does not work well in Word. Plus Word continues to suffer from file corruption issues. For 20 years I have used TeX and its children—LaTeX, ConTeXt, Xetex…—with text editors rather than word processors. Good text editors use regular expressions for find and replace, making them robust in reality. Plus text editors never corrupt files. I miss Pages, but write professionally, so need the flexibility and excellent output of TeX.

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Posted on Oct 27, 2023 1:29 PM

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Posted on Oct 27, 2023 1:53 PM

Apple completely rewrote Pages in late 2013 and it was not a port of Pages '09 v4.3 functionality. Those that want those old Pages Find/Replace features back should focus on MS Word or other word processing solutions that offer those capabilities.


Back when my Desktop was a real UNIX box, I used ditroff/troff/nroff to generate white papers with tables, charts, equations, and graphs in them. Had the full TeX installation compiled and installed on a Sun server but was invested in the documenters's workbench tools instead.


Today, I also have the full MacTeX 2023 distribution installed and use it occasionally. Since Apple has removed Groff, I also installed and compiled the UTF-8 updated Documenter's Work Bench Heirloom Doc tools, but frankly, too much time has passed since I have used these with affection and true skill. I don't find myself drawn to learn any markdown (.md) syntax either.



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Oct 27, 2023 1:53 PM in response to Bob Kerstetter

Apple completely rewrote Pages in late 2013 and it was not a port of Pages '09 v4.3 functionality. Those that want those old Pages Find/Replace features back should focus on MS Word or other word processing solutions that offer those capabilities.


Back when my Desktop was a real UNIX box, I used ditroff/troff/nroff to generate white papers with tables, charts, equations, and graphs in them. Had the full TeX installation compiled and installed on a Sun server but was invested in the documenters's workbench tools instead.


Today, I also have the full MacTeX 2023 distribution installed and use it occasionally. Since Apple has removed Groff, I also installed and compiled the UTF-8 updated Documenter's Work Bench Heirloom Doc tools, but frankly, too much time has passed since I have used these with affection and true skill. I don't find myself drawn to learn any markdown (.md) syntax either.



Nov 29, 2023 10:10 AM in response to VikingOSX

For about 20 years I used Word for writing system and application manuals, plus marketing materials and press releases. My work in Word, included developing a full-featured Windows Help system generator in Word Basic. The help system generator took about 45 minutes to create a help file from 400 pages of documentation created in Word. Each help file included hooks for calling topics from the application it supported. Another documentation project was a Word Basic tool for scanning and reporting on file servers installed worldwide, before public availability of the Internet. A really fun project automated documentation for engineers with limited writing experience. This system used Visual Basic for MS applications. In all of this, Word regularly corrupted files containing large numbers of pages or anything other than text. None of the corrupt files contained macros, because I kept those installed in template files and prohibited their copying into working documents. I was not the only one with Word file corruption issues. Sometimes I edited papers for international students referred to me by their university and seminary professors. These text-only files often suffered from corruption. Word file corruption happened on both Windows and Mac systems—machines I owned and machines managed by IT experts working for my customers. I continued to use Word for my customers, even after starting to use TeX. MS eventually added a command for fixing damaged files, but it seldom worked. To help reduce the pain of Word, I developed a Word macro to email to myself a copy of the currently active document. It automatically sent a backup every 10 minutes. All of this may make me sound like a grouch. I am not. Word does some things well. Its table of contents creation and tables with row and columns are excellent. Word is good for writing text letters or short reports containing some graphics. But even those get corrupted from time to time. I eventually learned how to manually recover lost data, often selecting everything in the file except for the final carriage return, then by copying and pasting into a new document. Sometimes recovery required opening and saving the damaged file in Open Office. For the past 20 years of using TeX with a TeX editor, not one single file has ever become corrupt. I have had system-level failures, but nothing caused by a text editor or TeX.

Older Versions of Pages Used to Find and Replace Formatting and Styles

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